Tag: story points

The scrum framework is forever tied to the language of sports in general and rugby in particular. We organize our project work around goals, sprints, points, and daily scrums. An unfortunate consequence of organizing projects around a sports metaphor is that the language of gaming ends up driving behavior. For example, people have a natural inclination to associate the idea of story points to a measure of success rather than an indicator of the effort required to complete the story. The more points you have, the more successful you are. This is reflected in an actual quote from a retrospective on things a team did well:

We completed the highest number of points in this sprint than in any other sprint so far.

This was a team that lost sight of the fact they were the only team on the field. They were certain to be the winning team. They were also destine to be he losing team. They were focused on story point acceleration rather than a constant, predictable velocity.

More and more I’m finding less and less value in using story points as an indicator for level of effort estimation. If Atlassian made it easy to change the label on JIRA’s story point field, I’d change it to “Fuzzy Bunnies” just to drive this idea home. You don’t want more and more fuzzy bunnies, you want no more than the number you can commit to taking care of in a certain span of time typically referred to as a “sprint.” A team that decides to take on the care and feeding of 50 fuzzy bunnies over the next two weeks but has demonstrated – sprint after sprint – they can only keep 25 alive is going to lose a lot of fuzzy bunnies over the course of the project.

It is difficult for people new to scrum or Agile to grasp the purpose behind an abstract idea like story points. Consequently, they are unskilled in how to use them as a measure of performance and improvement. Developing this skill can take considerable time and effort. The care and feeding of fuzzy bunnies, however, they get. Particularly with teams that include non-technical domains of expertise, such as content development or learning strategy.

A note here for scrum masters. Unless you want to exchange your scrum master stripes for a saddle and spurs, be wary of your team turning story pointing into an animal farm. Sizing story cards to match the exact size and temperament from all manner of animals would be just as cumbersome as the sporting method of story points. So, watch where you throw your rope, Agile cowboys and cowgirls.

In Parkinson’s Law of Triviality and Story Sizing, I touched on the issue of relative expertise among team members during collaborative efforts to size story cards. I’d like to expand on that idea by considering several types of team compositions.

Team 1 is a tight knit band of four software developers represented in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Team 1

Their preferred domain and depth of experience is represented by the color and area of their respective circles. While they each have their own area of expertise, there is a significant overlap in common knowledge. All four of them understand the underlying architecture, common coding practices, and fundamental coding principles. Furthermore, there is a robust amount of inter-domain expertise. When needed, the HTML5/CSS developer can probably help out with JavaScript issues, for example. The probability of this team successfully working together to size the stories in the product backlog is high.

Team 1 represents a near-ideal team composition for a typical software related project. However, the real world isn’t so generous in it’s allocation of near-ideal, let alone ideal, teams. A typical team for a software related project is more likely to resemble Team 2, as represented in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Team 2

In Team 2, the JavaScript developer is fresh out of college, new to the company and new to the business. His real-world experience is limited so his circle of expertise is smaller relative to his teammates. The HTML5/CSS developer has been working for the company for 10 years and knows the business like the back of her hand. So she has a much wider view of how her work impacts the company and product development. As a team, there is much less overlap and options for helping each other through a sprint is diminished. As for collaborative story sizing efforts, the HTML5/CSS and C# developers are likely to dominate the conversation while the JavaScript developer agrees with just about anything not JavaScript related.

As Agile practices become more ubiquitous in the business world, team composition beings to resemble Team 3, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 – Team 3

The mix now includes non-technical people – content developers and editors, strategists, and designers. Even assuming an equal level of experience in their respective domains, the company, and the business environment, there is very little overlap. Arriving at a consensus during a story sizing exercise now becomes a significant challenge. But again, the real world isn’t even so kind as this. We are increasingly more likely to encounter teams that resemble Team 4 as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 – Team 4

As before, the relative circle of expertise among team members can vary quite a bit. When a team resembles the composition of Team 4, the software developers (HTML5/CSS and C#) will have trouble understanding what the Learning Strategist is asking for while the Learning Strategist may not understand why what he wants the software developers to deliver isn’t possible.

When I’ve attempted to facilitate story sizing sessions with teams that resemble Team 4 they either become quite contentious (and therefore time consuming) or team members that don’t have the expertise to understand a particular card simply accept the opinion of the stronger voices. Neither one of these situations is desirable.

To counteract these possibilities, I’ve found it much more effective to have the card assignee determine the card size (points and time estimate) and work to have the other team members ask questions about the work described on the card such that the assignee and the team better understand the context in which the card is positioned. The team members that lack domain expertise, it turns out, are in a good position to help craft good acceptance criteria.

Who will consume the work product that results from the card? (dependencies)

What cards need to be completed before a particular card can be worked on? (dependencies)

Is everything known about what a particular card needs before it can be completed? (dependencies, discovery, exploration)

At the end of a brief conversation where the entire team is working to evaluate the card for anything other than level of effort (time) and complexity (points), it is not uncommon for the assignee to reconsider their sizing, break the card into multiple cards, or determine the card shouldn’t be included in the sprint backlog. In short, it ends up being a much more productive conversation if teammates aren’t haggling over point distinctions or passively accepting what more experienced teammates are advocating. The benefit to the product owner is that they now have additional information that will undoubtedly influence the product backlog prioritization.